It was refreshing to rise at home rather than the slightly softened authoritarian confines of the hospital! The image above contains the view from the bed in vertical wing of Virginia Hospital’s new SIX BEE where the future meets the past in the complexity and of our current adventures.

The imposing towers mark the general boundaries of new construction at the Virginia Hospital complex in NoVA. You can observe the little cloud of steam over the unadorned building at lower left. Depending on wind direction, the plume proved to be a casual contributor of motion to the more static view. The stream ripening quickly as it rose, imposing motion on Arlington’s curiously busy stillness.

This process of re-joining normal locomotion requires expending some energy. We are engineering a strange duality of existence. As a group, we have had divisions in analytic assessment. We continue our former profession in assessing the impact of events on our ordinary lives while watching streaming episodes of Downton Abbey, the marvelous comedy of manners broadcast from 2010 to 2015. The show analyzed Britain’s transition from Empire to Great Decline. We appear to be mimicking it in a North American context.

It seems appropriate to note the resonate echoes of other changes both ancient and new.

It is a change that is also a constant. We now view the ‘news’ as what it is- another long-running dramatic series filled with inadvertent comedy. One of them was this morning. We shiver with the reports of the Big Chill enveloping Europe this morning. It is a fascinating application to decrypt the message being transmitted and derive the purpose of it.

The reality of weather and war have been the topics of discussion for as long as our species has roamed this world. If you have slouched forward from our starting point with the other Boomers you will recall the hysteria about the return of the Ice Age that was the bugaboo of the early 1970s. The Weather lady did not cooperate and things seemed to inch upward in temperature through the time of the Paris Accords in 2015. We all agreed on that until we had to disagree.

We do not know if Downton Abbey’s termination is related to climate change, but we are confident we could find a journalistic forum to assert it.

The discontinuity of observed reality and computer-generated predictions has caused another change in messaging. The writers decided to cover both streams into one, which is not “hotter” or “colder,” but changing to maintain consistency in narrative.

We think we can all agree on that as a compromise in scripting the story line.

So, all the other stuff- other change- continues as viewed by all of us hurtling through space. There are two conflicts in progress in our world, both now presented with the number of days of violence. There is the real possibility of a third to emerge in the Far East as China asserts a new role in the days to come. We wonder what they will call it?

For our crowd, it is back to the front of change.

Copyright 2023 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com